In a classic Peanuts comic strip, Linus and Charlie Brown are having a conversation. Linus says, “I guess it’s wrong always to be worrying about tomorrow. Maybe we should think only about today.” Charlie Brown responds, “No, that’s giving up. I’m still hoping that yesterday will get better.”
We read it and smile. But how many of us do something similar?
Looking Back
We look back on earlier times as the “good old days,” conveniently forgetting the difficulties we lived through. In a sense, we’ve made yesterday better than it was—and we long for that idealized past. We might regret leaving a relationship or a job, and in hindsight make it far more appealing than it actually was. Not long ago, I spoke with a woman who kept describing how, if she’d made just one different choice, she wouldn’t be in the situation she’s in now. She was trying to make yesterday better so today would feel more bearable.
It’s a somewhat twisted way of coping: imagining today could be better if only we’d made different decisions—or had different experiences—in the past.
What Was Reality?
Do we tend to clean up the past more as we get older? For those of us who carry regrets about who we were and how we behaved when we were younger, there’s a temptation to minimize the problems we caused or the harm we did. But forgiving yourself is very different from pretending something didn’t happen—or that it happened differently than it did. For some of us, we hit a point in our lives when reality sets in. We realize we’re not going to accomplish everything we once hoped for. And so we replay the decision points of our lives, vividly imagining the roads not taken and where they might have led.
It’s obvious that reimaging the past is not going to change the present or the future. Making yesterday better is not going to change today or tomorrow. But we may be able to learn from the past, and particularly from the events we most regret and wish we could change. Think of one thing in the past that you most regret doing or saying. What is the primary lesson to learn from that? How could this lesson influence your behavior now?
Lessons Learned
For myself, I regret not making more time to visit my mother when she was in a care facility and not doing well. I live in California and she was in Ohio. Therefore, it took some planning, but in retrospect I could have gone more often than I did. Although I feel deep regret about that, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. What I can do is make an effort to visit people important to me now. Especially if times are not good for them.
Can you think of an example for yourself? We simply cannot make yesterday better, but we can learn from it. And as Linus says, maybe we should think only about today. No matter what we did or didn’t do yesterday, what can we do today that might make things better for someone else and for ourselves?
If any of this sparks a thought for you, please let the rest of us know so we can all learn from one another.
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